A Moscow court has sentenced five people to prison terms of up to life for the 2006 murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Earlier, a jury found all the defendants guilty and said four of them did not deserve clemency.

Politkovskaya was
murdered on October 7, 2006, as she entered the apartment
building where she lived in central Moscow.

On Monday, the Moscow
City Court announced the sentences for the killers. It sided with
the prosecution to hand down a life sentence to
ringleaderLom-Ali
Gaitukaev, and
hisnephewRustam Makhmudov, the man who pulled the
trigger.

Gaitukaev, is already serving a 2008-imposed
15 year jail sentence for organizing a separate contract
killing.

Other gang members, Makhmudov's brothers Ibragim and Dzhabarail,
were sentenced to 12 and 14 years in jail, respectively. Both
helped track Politkovskaya on the day of her murder. She was shot
on her return from shopping for groceries at a supermarket.

The last convict, Sergey Khadzhikurbanov, was given a sentence of
20 years for serving as a middleman in the crime.

Earlier, another man
linked to the murder wassentencedto 11 years after accepting a plea
bargain. Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov used his position as a police
officer to establish surveillance over Politkovskaya's movements.
He testified against his accomplices at the trial.

Three of the convicts
were already tried for the same crime and acquitted in February
2009 due to lack of evidence. But Russia’s Supreme Court backed a
request by prosecutors and ordered a re-trial in August of the
same year.

Politkovskaya was a prominent investigative journalist and human
rights activist, who covered extensively the turbulent Russia's
Chechen Republic. Her death was a high profile event, which many
critics of Russia used as an example of the country's failure to
provide security to the media.

The question remains of who actually paid Gaitukaev for the hit,
as Politkovskaya made a lot of enemies through her journalistic
work.